Jessica’s eyes flew open in time to see a long tongue of flame streaking across the floor toward her feet. Her fingers worked quickly to remove the straps and buckles she had used to hold herself to the seat. Her feet stomped up and down, crushing the littler flames but the larger ones just kept coming.
One of the straps was stuck, wedged in tightly below the buckle. She was going to burn to death! Panic set in, making her fingers fumble. Smoke blew toward her, obscuring her vision and cutting off her breath. Her pulse raced higher, making her breathing ragged and too fast and she began to drag and gulp lungfuls of that rancid, acrid air.
Talon shouted, “Jessica! Stop! Put your hands up!”
Her head spun. The smoke going down her lungs was seductive. It spoke of an easy death. One in which she would feel no pain. She couldn’t focus her eyes, and the panic had long since erased her ability to reason.
Talon’s familiar hands yanked her fingers away from the buckle. She tried to fight him, but he held her hands easily with one of his own while the fingers of his other hand undid the buckle. She came out of the seat and into his arms and then he was hauling her away from that seat and the sudden cone of fire that surrounded it.
Tears, some of them from the smoke, flew down her face. She could barely see in front of her, and everything was veiled and fuzzy behind the gray-blue smoke and the orange-blue flames dancing across every surface.
Sirens screamed out warnings as they staggered down a hallway that would lead them to an exit. Caleb and dozens more were already running ahead of them; she could barely see their dim figures, but she could hear their shouts and recognize their voices.
They burst out of the ship and onto the flat hard surface of a docking station. The ships above them sent down wave after wave of weapon fire, crumbling the ground and sending larger conflagrations to join with the one spreading from the wrecked ship.
They ran. There was nothing else they could do. The Gorlites were destroying every ship at the docking station. Debris rained down all around them, most of it flaming or glowing with radia-spore.
Beings, humans and others, who had been aboard the ships now under attack, fled the ships in waves. Jessica screamed in a mixture of both rage and horror as she watched the enemy mow down fleeing civilians.
“We have to help them!”
Her cry struck the air but was lost below the cacophony of sirens, explosions, screams, and weapon fire. They ran faster because there was nothing that they could do at the moment.
The lines for arrivals and departures were in chaos as people bolted and ran for whatever safety they could find as more enemy fire rained down upon the large buildings, destroying them into piles of rubble and ash.
Jessica’s feet stopped, her heels digging in as she watched a small female child, obviously too terror-stricken to do anything to help herself, huddled against the side of a tumbling building that was about to fall right on her head.
Jessica bolted toward her. “Come here!”
The little girl’s eyes rolled upward, and a long scream rolled from her mouth. Jessica’s hands came out, but the little girl ducked away from her just as the rubble collapsed and poured down toward her. Jessica’s fingertips caught just a bit of the thin tunic the girl wore, and she yanked her forward, her body already arcing away from that lethal fall of rock and other debris.
The ground below her feet rumbled and shook, and the little girl screamed loudly in her ear. Her arms went around Jessica’s neck so tightly that all of Jessica’s air was cut off.
Talon shouted, “Give her to me!”
The little girl refused to be unseated, and Talon had to pry her arms away from Jessica. Black spots danced on the edges of Jessica’s vision as the little girl’s arms pressed closer around her neck, cutting off all airflow.
Talon yanked the little girl, still screaming at the top of her lungs, away from Jessica and then handed her off to a startled looking human woman who merely gripped the little girl’s hand tightly and ran onward, heading for the underground entrances.
Jessica shouted at Talon, “They shouldn’t go underground! The first thing that they will do is get trapped down there if the Federation traitors and the Gorlites decide to seal it off instead of fight them!”
They found themselves with Caleb, Harlon, and a dozen others. They put their backs against a wall and managed to get a few minutes of respite there.
Jessica bent forward, her hands going to her knees as she dragged in long breaths of air. Her pulse eventually regulated and her breathing return to normal. The dizziness left her, but the fear remained.
“What do we do, Talon?”
Her face turned to his when she asked the question as she immediately looked away. He looked as uncertain as she felt. She knew that of course he had no plan; how could he have had a plan for this? This was not supposed to happen!
Talon said, “They knew. They knew that we knew they were there.”
Jessica shook her head. Her hair moved across her face as she did so, bringing in a singed and burnt smell. “They could not possibly have known. They must’ve just decided to go ahead since… Perhaps they recognized us. You’ve been hunting their kind for so many years, and you know they are a race that vows revenge for every death.”
Talon said, “Jessica. Please just hear me out. Even if they had recognized me or us and our ship, they would not have jeopardized such a huge price; they would not have gone ahead with the plan in so early unless they knew that there was a plan in place to stop them.”
Jessica’s back met the brick wall. She knew what Talon was trying to tell her, but she could not believe that.
She would not believe that.
